640 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



and a slaughtering point tliat tliereis no Christmas beef too heavy or 

 too good to go to, and no hogs too heavy to go to. There isn't any reason 

 why we should have to pay freight and lose shrinkage and pay freight 

 back on our cured meats from Chicago and these other places. You have 

 slept on your rights in this regard while the railroads have been busy 

 training the people where to ship their stock. I found out the other day 

 tliat twenty miles from Des Moines they ship to St. Louis, because they 

 have the Wabash road running there. There ought to be a market built 

 in Iowa that will handle a situation of this kind. 



Now, of course, whether I caused these losses or not, I sure get the 

 blame more than anybody else. I have worked day and night on this 

 proposition since it came on, and you may think it sounds foolish, 

 but I have had a paralyzed hand and arm from holding a constant posi- 

 tion at the telephone; my elbow got bruised so that I couldn't lean on it 

 any more, and my fingers on my left hand would be numb all night long. 

 I did more telephoning than I ever expected to do in all my life, and 

 long distance telephoning is hard work. 



Out of all our troubles and with the general disinfection of stockyards 

 and stock cars, and the present requirement that every car must be dis- 

 infected after every shipment, I believe you are paving the way for enough 

 less cholera in Iowa to pay you for all the trouble you have been to. I 

 want to see it put into law that no railroad company can bring a dirty 

 car into Iowa, or sidetrack a dirty car with all kinds of infection in it. If 

 we can't run both things at once, suppose we ease up on the cutting of 

 freight rates and demand sanitary service from the railroads. The stock 

 cars ought to go out for every load so clean that the man who has the best 

 known Short-horn bull or the best boar in Iowa could put it in that car 

 safely. It has even come to a point that the man who ships his boars 

 by express is in danger, because the express cars are not cleaned and 

 disinfected as they should be. And the man who has a number of cattle 

 to ship can't get a car that ventilates properly and gives his cattle a fair 

 shipment in the warmer part of the year, because he doesn't dare load 

 them in a stock car. He has to jam them into a box-car. That is one serious 

 problem with the man who owns good stock. I hope they will put into 

 law this year something like the proclamation for disinfection of cars 

 that we sent out. It may be improved, but it covered the point in a very 

 few words, that every car in Iowa had to be disinfected, and that no com- 

 pany should haul a car into the state of Iowa that was not cleaned and 

 disinfected. 



Let me tell you about some of our good luck. The government is trac- 

 ing every car and every secondary exposure. There were two cars that 

 hauled diseased cattle from Chicago to Fulton, 111. One of these cars came 

 into Iowa twice after carrying this load to Fulton, and went out again, and 

 was caught in Wisconsin with other cars, and disinfected there two or 

 three weeks after its infection. It came into Iowa empty both times, and 

 carried stock out. If it had brought anything in, it would undoubtedly 

 have given us a new focus of disease everywhere it unloaded. Another 

 car came from Fulton, 111., to Belle Plaine, Iowa; from Belle Plaine to 



